Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone said Thursday that Rupert Murdoch's potential plan to block Google from searching New Corp.'s (NWS) websites is doomed to fail. Murdoch has accused Google (GOOG) of stealing content from his publications, which include The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the U.S., and The Times and The Sun in the United Kingdom. The cantankerous tycoon said last week that blocking Google could be part of his strategy to get more people to pay for content online.

Here's a young man, all of 35, who runs a company that makes no money, telling an old man, 78, who runs companies that have made billions, that he is wrong. But while it's easy to dismiss Stone's comments as youthful bravado, I think he's giving Murdoch some valuable advice.

Every news organization makes mistakes. But when Fox News makes mistakes, they seem to tilt in a suspiciously consistent direction, favoring Republicans and conservatives over Democrats and liberals.

It happened again Wednesday, when host Gregg Jarrett, introducing a segment on Happening Now, described the "huge crowds" that were turning out to greet Sarah Palin on the promotional tour for her book, Going Rogue. "These are some of the pictures just coming into us," Jarrett said as images of Palin surrounded by throngs of supporters flashed across the screen.

As I've written, it's all but inconceivable that News Corp. (NWS) will block Google (GOOG) from indexing the stories produced by its various online news outlets, but try telling Rupert Murdoch that. In an interview on his own Fox Business Network Tuesday, the owner of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post continued to hint that he's willing to resort to the nuclear option unless Google starts cutting publishers in on the billions it's making off their content.

"They have devised a brilliant search engine that scrapes all the material published in the world, and on the back of that they sell search, but they don't pay for the raw material," said Murdoch. "We have to do something about that."

For Chase Carey, News Corp.'s new president and chief operating officer, the math in the media business is pretty simple these days: Getting paid one way is good. Getting paid two ways is better.

Whether it's broadcast television, newspapers or Internet video, the key to survival is supplementing advertising revenue with subscription fees and other revenues derived, directly or indirectly, from consumers, said Carey in an interview Thursday at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money Conference.

Lou Dobbs, the voluble CNN anchor who became a political lightning rod for his outspoken views on immigration and global trade, is leaving the cable news network effective immediately, he announced on his show Wednesday night. Dobbs, one of the premier news broadcasters in the television business, was the last of the original anchors at CNN, which pioneered the cable news format 30 years ago. Dobbs's contract extended through the end of 2011, but he said CNN had agreed to let him leave early.

"Some leaders in the media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond my role here at CNN and engage in constructive problem-solving," said Dobbs, who had dubbed himself "Mr. independent" of late, adding that he aimed to stay involved in the national discourse.

Is a deal with Satan the kind of thing you're required to disclose in a proxy statement? If so, I'll be very curious to see the one filed after Comcast (CMCSA) completes its takeover of NBC Universal (GE).

It's hard to imagine what else could account for the continuing employment of Jeff Zucker as the head of one of the world's premier media conglomerates -- even as it becomes increasingly clear how unfit he is for the job. Now it looks like not even the sale of his company will put an end to Zucker's reign of error: Reuters reports that Comcast has agreed to keep him on as the CEO of the joint venture created by the acquisition, if and when it comes to fruition. This despite the availability of former News Corp. (NWS) president Peter Chernin, a media executive with a substantially better track record than Zucker's. Chernin is advising Comcast in the deal.

Love her or hate her, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate, is always a hot topic of conversation in the media. Her memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, slated for release by News Corp.'s (NWS) HarperCollins next Tuesday, November 17, is no exception; it's been making news since the ink dried on the deal made last May.

Going Rogue was one of 10 books selected for massive discounting by Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), and Target (TGT) in their ongoing price war. Palin made headlines last month when she revealed that HarperCollins had paid her a $1.25 million "retainer" sometime between January 1 and July 26, the day she stepped down as Alaska governor. Oprah Winfrey has her booked on her show next Monday, which the author will follow with a bus tour to far-flung corners of the country (or as she famously called them during the 2008 campaign, "the real America"). No less than three books about Palin are slated for publication around the same time, including a parody called Going Rouge: An American Nightmare.

Nobody ever accused the New York Post of being a hotbed of political correctness. But according to a lawsuit filed Monday, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid is more than just another rowdy newsroom where off-color jokes are tolerated -- it's a place where women are harassed and propositioned by their male bosses, minority workers are mocked and marginalized, and those who object too loudly are subject to retaliation.

Those are the allegations of Sandra Guzman, a former associate editor who was terminated by the Post last month. The only black or Hispanic female editor at the right-wing tabloid, she was also the only staffer to go public with her disapproval of a cartoon published in March that was seen by many as a racist attack on President Obama and led to protests outside the Post's offices (pictured). Her dismissal provoked speculation that she had been fired in retribution for breaking ranks and giving the paper's critics ammunition.

For a publisher celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, Harlequin has been thinking ahead. Much of the voluminous catalog from the romance publisher is available for digital download in multiple formats, so fans of steamy novels can access all they want on their Kindles, iPhones, and netbooks at the ready, without worrying that particular titles will disappear from bookstores when the next month's titles arrive.

Harlequin's longstanding policy of acquiring worldwide rights in all formats means it has the means to reach a global audience with whatever reading format they choose: print, digital, audio, or something that doesn't exist yet. So it seems like a no-brainer that Harlequin, a division of Toronto-based Torstar Corp. (TORSF), would launch an imprint devoted exclusively to digital books. But Carina Press, which will operate independently of Harlequin, might pave the way for major publishers to put their money where their e-book mouth is.

A lot of publishers have been making angry noises recently about news aggregators, which have been profiting from content they played no part in creating while the content producers themselves go begging. But no publisher has yet shown the slightest willingness to take the incredibly simple step that would disrupt this state of affairs: block Google (GOOG) from indexing its stories.

Until now.

Of course it would be Rupert Murdoch, that pugnacious iconoclast, vowing to lead the charge. In a recent interview with his own Sky News Australia, the News Corp. (NWS) chairman said his company's news sites will most likely make their stories invisible to Google once they've adopted a pay-to-read model, something he has promised is coming. Murdoch says he's willing to sacrifice the millions of clicks his websites get from Google News and Web searches if it will help persuade readers to subscribe to WSJ.com, nypost.com and foxnews.com, to name a few.

On the eve of its 40th anniversary, Sesame Street is courting a strange political controversy. A two-year-old episode featuring Oscar the Grouch as a (what else?) grouchy TV news reporter for (who else?) the Grouch News Network has caused a minor Internet kerfuffle among steamed fans of News Corp.'s (NWS) Fox News.

In the episode in question, Oscar the Grouch is a reporter covering, in breathless cable-news fashion, the trials and tribulations of Horatio the Elephant, who's trying to extricate himself from a bathtub. Oscar's quest for "all grouchy, all disgustin', all yucky" news goes awry when there's "breaking news" -- namely, Cookie Monster breaking a cookie.

Media and newspaper companies have had dismal fortunes last year, and book publishing is no exception. Layoffs, mergers of imprints, declining sales, rising costs -- all put the biggest publishing houses deep in the red in the last two quarters of 2008. But the latest quarterly numbers coming in tell a more optimistic story for their massive parent conglomerates.

Lagardere's (LGDDF) preliminary Q1 earnings report, released Wednesday, won't have anyone popping Champagne bottles. Consolidated revenues for the first nine months of 2009 fell 3.7% (or 3.9% on a like-for-like basis) to €5.8 billion ($8.6 billion); the magazine and broadcast divisions alone fell 19.1% for the first quarter. But the publishing division, including Hachette Book Group USA, has been a rock for Lagardere -- thanks to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels, which have been a rock for Hachette.

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) posted a stronger-than-expected profit for its fiscal first quarter and said business was recovering as customers are buying more network equipment again. Its revenue outlook for the current quarter also exceeded Wall Street expectations. Shares rose over 3.5 percent in premarket trade.

Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) posted a surprise profit last quarter -- its first after three losing quarters -- and trimmed its projected red ink for the year. Toyota said results were due to government measures around the world designed to boost sales of environmentally friendly cars and other vehicles. Shares were 2 percent higher ahead of the bell.

During the News Corp (NWS) earnings call, CEO Rupert Murdoch and COO Chase Carey both mentioned that the entertainment company's deal with Google (GOOG) to deliver ad space to social network MySpace was in trouble. Murdoch said, "It's quite simple. We've not been making our minimum guarantees so our search revenue will not be what our revenue was." "We're still losing traffic," Chase Carey, chief operating officer of News Corp told the Financial Times. "It's a business in transition."

The deal with Google, which runs from the first quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2010, was expected to bring News Corp $900 million. Murdoch indicated that the payments might come up as much as $100 million short because of traffic shortfalls at MySpace.

Rupert Murdoch wants everyone to know that Fox News doesn't start playground fights -- but it's not afraid of them, either.

On a conference call to discuss News Corp.'s (NWS) fiscal first-quarter earnings, the 78-year-old chairman, dialing in from Sydney, Australia, was asked about reports that Fox News had agreed to a "cease-fire" in its war of words with MSNBC, and about a recent White House effort to isolate and discredit his network.

"We did not start this abuse, which we thought went way beyond," Murdoch said about the hostilities with MSNBC, implying that it was the rival network's commentator Keith Olbermann and colleagues who had initiated them. "It was personal and went way beyond -- not on me but on others. Finally, we had to allow people to retaliate. The moment they stop, we'll stop. We don't believe in it, and we don't think it's good business."